i spent a great deal of time trying to get Quake3 to work. And then after everything failed i decided that maybe a reboot will fix my problems...BAD IDEA!! now i can't even launch the xserver with a fatal FONT error or something. I tried reinstalling the nvidia drivers but i still get the error when launching X. Now i basically have a worthless operating system on my other partition.

have you tried just reconfiguring X instead of just reinstalling drivers ??

Well im using Mandrake and i xf86setup wont work.

It happened to me too, actually a couple of times, when I thought I found the sweet spot that has less bugs and feels good, the Mandy had screwed up my fonts settings and I had the same situation, I've looked for explanation on forums, I tried to run Xconfigurator all to no avail, so the only resolution was to re-install, I really hate it espacially when there's a lot of tweaking has been done, and all of it is just lost, I am sorry can't help you with that pal, I'd suggest to reinstall the danm thing.

the font it refers to in the error message must be in XF86Config or XF86Config-4 in /etc/X11/ to stop it from loading.

find the line that loads the font and comment it out with #

Ill give it a try.

Ok the exact error i get is:

Could not open default font ' fixed '.

I figured out how to launch the XF86 configuration utility, you type XFdrake. But no matter which mode i changed to it would always say "Could not open default font ' fixed '".

Maybe my default font got messed up one way or the other, i still have the console to work with and i HAVE to find a way to fix this becuase i dont really have time to reinstall it again, specially since half the stuff i have installed in from the net' rather than the cd packages.

Run the "df" command and see if any of your filesystems (especially /tmp) are full or near capacity. I know a full /tmp filesystem will cause this message.


Speck

Ran the df command ant my /tmp is 80% full only.

I tried reconfiguring X server with XFdrake and then i saved the configuration. When i try startX i get this error now:

wmaker: can not load object libwraster.so.2 no such file or directory.

It was VERY close to this, and im positive that its libwraster.so.2 i remember that.

If it is WINDOWMAKER that is causing the error can i remove windowmaker completely? or can i just specify it to leave out wmaker during the startx process??

How about trying a window manager that doesn't rely on any external libraries (other than basic X libraries) and see if you still get any errors. I would suggest downloading and installing UDE and see if X still errors out. It's a very minimal, but useful window manager. You should probably clean out all you can in /tmp too, if you haven't already.

Speck

Ok, i dont use WindowMaker dont be fooled, i had it install though. How do i startX with KDE only, becuase thats what i have.

If not can i use wget to download that UDE and install it ? but then how would i launch it? Becuase in the console you can't see the files located inside and stuff so unless someone tells me the names of the direcories it extracts to i cant do it.

Usually, you can edit (or create if it doesn't exist) the ~/.xinitrc file and add the following line to the file:

exec startkde

Just make sure it's the only "exec mywindowmanager" in the file. I haven't used Mandrake, so I don't know if they require additional changes. You can read through the execution steps in the "startx" script to see what config files it's using, if you understand shell script.

Yeah, you can download UDE with wget. It's the normal "tar xvfz ude-SNAP09062001.tar.gz", cd to "ude-SNAP09062001" directory and then read the "INSTALL" file (just the normal ./configure, make, su -c "make install"). Then add "exec uwm" to the ~/.xinitrc file.


Speck

Wooooohoo it works.!

All i needed to do is add the directory to the ld.so.conf file !! im so happy. (thank god for the console)

Did you need to add /usr/local/lib to ld.so.conf and run ldconfig? Good debugging on that one.


Speck